AuthorTopic: Powersoft Digam K10 (Read 45899 times)

Tom Benson is my area rep for the Dolby Lake Processor, and while I was squeezing one of those out of him he asked if I wanted anything else he reps, which happens to include Powersoft. I allowed as to how I might be convinced to take a pair of Digam K10 amplifiers on the road for a while, and he acquiesced.

If you've read the Wedge Fest Wrapup thread in the LAB, you'll know that we had the K10s there for power. On day one we started out using my normal monitor amps, the 500 watt per channel Crest CPX 2600, an amp that's been a real workhorse for me for the last few years. Sadly, when you're trying to get over 140dB out of a wedge, that amp starts to run out of juice around 130dB with most reasonably efficient wedges.

The Powersoft Digam K10, on the other hand, claims to produce 2,000 watts of power into an 8 ohm load, and an eye opening 12,000 watts into 4 ohms bridged. You've heard it said that you need to get 3dB more power to make a significant difference? Well, the K10 offers a whole 6dB more power over what I'm used to at 8 ohms, enough juice to turn most speakers to steam if you're not careful.

What's more impressive is that this amp is only 1U in height and, while a little deeper than your average amp (just under 18"), weighs less than 27lbs (12Kg). In the same 2RU that you'd previously been getting maybe 6 or 7Kw out of a modern switching amp, you can now pack 24,000 watts at a weight cost of just over 50lbs. Long gone are the days of 3RU 300 watt amps weighing 50+ pounds, indeed!

To accomplish this, they obviously need a ton of power reserve built into the amp and, as you can see from this photo from their website, it looks like a solid bank of capacitors and heatsink.

After using the amps for the two days of Wedge Fest (and, fortunately, only sacrificing the voice coil of one wedge) I brought them home for a little, um, goofing around and photo taking.

The K10 offers Neutrik combo jack inputs (1/4" or XLR), Speakon outputs, RS-485 and (optional) ethernet control and monitoring, and a universal power factor corrected power supply with a funny CPC connector that must be rated for over 30A. I've just got generic 15A blade plugs wired on the end of my cables for power, which might be a little worrying until this next part... the amp's built in LCD interface with (optional) DSP.My model doesn't have DSP, but the interface that is there lets you set everything from maximum voltage output (to keep from frying voice coils) to maximum current draw (to keep from tripping breakers) to clip limiters, input gates, input sensitivity, and extensive monitoring of current and voltage, both at the power supply and at the speaker outputs. The unit also has fault and temperature logging built in, plus more than the expected level of fault protection and a nice inrush current limiting feature to keep you from tripping breakers if you turn a bunch of these babies on at once. In short this is a lean, mean, power machine with a well thought out feature set and an extremely easy to use interface.

Here's a few exterior shots of the unit set up on my exclusive testing bench:

While it performed brilliantly at Wedge Fest, giving us the closest thing to unlimited power I have ever experienced, I'm getting ready to take these two amps out for a very real world test... powering a whole bunch of EAW SB1000 subwoofers for a three-week-long outdoor fair and festival at the Eastern States Exposition in MA. After beating them up for awhile, I'll take a bunch more photos and get right back to y'all!

...Well, the K10 offers a whole 6dB more power over what I'm used to at 8 ohms, enough juice to turn most speakers to steam if you're not careful....While it performed brilliantly at Wedge Fest, giving us the closest thing to unlimited power I have ever experienced...

...and the closest thing to stupid loud most of us have experienced! That amp is scary! Oh well, too deep for my rack.

Have fun at the Big E, Bennett, looks like you'll have plenty of power for it, maybe I'll see you up there and retrieve my pimp cane.

Thanks Bennett for the kind words regarding Powersoft and for your continued Road Test. I will be following the thread as you post. We are all happy to answer any questions any of you may have regarding the technology "under the hood".The power connector is not proprietary and as Ian pointed out, is readily available. Amphenol also has them.

As promised, I took the K10s out on the road to handle sub duty at "The Big E", a.k.a. the Eastern States Exposition, one of the top 10 fairs in the United States. They're driving 6 EAW SB1000s (3 each) as the center cluster of a subwoofer system to cover 7,000 screaming country fans three times a weekend. The SB1000s are backing up two clusters of 4 Ramsdell horn loaded single 18" subs powered by Crest Pro 9200s, which are delayed in order to modify the polar pattern of the center cluster to cover the sides of the arena, which is quite wide.

I set up the amps using the front panel controls, letting them know they're each on a 20A breaker and getting their gain matched to the Crest amps (which required a little math, since the Crests are set to 40x gain, while the PowerSofts set their gain in decibels. For future reference: 40x = 32dB). We then powered the whole PA up, walked the arena to make sure that my coverage bet panned out, and left the PA to the headliner for their 8:00 p.m. show.

Hours later Scott, one of the owners of the sound company that had hired me for this event, and I wandered under the stage to check on the K10s. At first glance we thought they might not have been patched in correctly, but then we discovered that even while we were using a good amount of our amps up on deck we had so much headroom left on the Powersofts that the LED ladders weren't even lighting up except on extremely hard kick hits, and even then we were only lighting the first few lights. This is for sub coverage for 7,000 people! "That's sick. Everyone should have these." was the remark from Scott.

So far, so good! I wish I had the DSP and ethernet control options for these amps, but I think that at that point I might have to answer to the United Nations council on nuclear weaponry. We'll see what Lee Ann Womack's engineer has to say tonight.

I spent a good half hour under the stage talking with George Olson, Lee Ann Womack's monitor engineer. He was incredibly impressed with the Powersoft amps and wasn't quite ready to believe me until he went out front and ran some tracks through the rig... hearing is indeed believing! Looks like they'll do what they promise.